In an enterprise computing environment, large, complex applications that are used in business-critical situations demand well-integrated monitoring and management for safe and successful operation. Monitoring helps avoid unplanned downtimes, which, for example, can produce costs in the six figures per hour. Tightly integrated monitoring systems for single computer family environments have been available for a number of years, for example in the SAP R/3 System. These monitoring systems are based on a suite of management and monitoring tools designed to monitor system resource usage and detect problems by generating statistics and reporting performance data from a variety of business applications running on common platforms.
Many enterprises increasingly find themselves using multiple distinct computing systems to run different aspects of their businesses. SAP for example created ALE (Application Link Enabling) and other technologies to allow multiple R/3 Systems to interact. Application-level links were created, for example, to allow R/3 Systems running the Sales or HR applications to update financials data across system boundaries.
In response to the vastly increased complexity of managing a landscape of systems that are in interaction with one another, centralized management systems were developed, such as SAP's Computing Center Management System (CCMS), that incorporate a uniform monitoring architecture that allows performance and error data to be collected from diverse applications in individual R/3 Systems and shared by means of R/3 Remote Function Calls (RFCs) between systems. Effectively, a customer could set up a central monitoring system, which saw the monitoring data from multiple R/3 Systems. However, because of its reliance on SAP's proprietary ABAP language and RFC, the view offered by the monitoring architecture was limited to traditional R/3 Systems and their application servers, together with the applications running in those systems.
With ever-greater diversity in the software landscape within single enterprises, as open component-oriented computing and Internet applications have been embraced, the pure one company proprietary approach to that environment has been relegated to the past. Given that some of these diverse components may participate in mission critical functions, it is just as important, however, from the IT department point of view, to monitor their performance as that of systems still running exclusively on the traditional core platforms like R/3.
Efforts to capture and transfer equivalent monitoring data from these diverse new sources so as to maintain the comprehensiveness of the existing centralized monitoring system have so far met with limited success. As at result, the scope of monitoring capable from within the centralized monitoring architecture has become over the years increasingly less adequate.